(no subject)

[eirias]

A nice op-ed piece by Tim O'Reilly on a clash between Google and authors. The gist: Google wants to digitize entire university libraries and make the content searchable, with only snippets available online; the Authors' Guild contends that this is copyright infringement.

It will be very interesting to watch what happens to copyright law over the next thirty years.

Comments

[ksledgemoore.livejournal.com]

if it's only snippets that are available, I don't see what the problem is...

[thekat03.livejournal.com]

right... after all, amazon and other bookstores online give snippets of the books as well, and it's legal to photocopy portions of books (though it is copyright infringement to copy over 90% of a book, i think)

[eirias.livejournal.com]

This process would require digitizing the entire book - that is, copying 100% of the book. The point of the digitization would be to allow people to search for, e.g., the phrase "slithy toves did gyre and gimble" on Google and turn up every book in which "Jabberwocky" is published. Or to search for "+death +pineapples" and to find all books that reference both. The key is that the search would not *display* the entirety of the work online; it would merely display a small amount for context, and then point to the publication information so that the interested person could look it up and read or purchase it. It's a cool idea, and it seems a pity that the league representing authors is against it - my understanding suggests that O'Reilly is right when he supposes that the potential gain (an expanded audience for obscure works, which includes most works) well outweighs the potential cost (which I suppose to be the risk of the content database being hacked and distributed widely for free). I know too little about computer security to be sure of this, but O'Reilly knows just a bit more and is not visibly in the pay of Google, so I trust his judgment.

[cognative.livejournal.com]

As of now I can copy a book and post it on the net for free. Would this google thing really pose that much more of a threat than copy machines and pdf files already have?

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, you can, and technically I imagine that's illegal. Like anything, they'll only come after you if there's money to be gained by so doing, or money to be lost by refraining. Google is a big fish and provides content to a ton of people; if they were systematically providing whole libraries worth of content, a lot of money would be at stake. What they're actually trying to do is quite different - much more akin to Amazon's snippets - but the process by which they're doing it freaks out the Authors' Guild. I don't know; I don't think their response is all that logical, but I do see why they're freaking out more majorly about this than they would if I digitized a trashy romance novel and threw it up on the 'net.